Jude, Remembering

Jude 17 But you, beloved, remember the words which were spoken before by the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ:

Jude reminds us (and his readership) that if we are fellow Christians, we are beloved. We are not only beloved by Jude, but we are to love and be loved by anyone who names Jesus Christ as their Savior. Jesus told us, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another,” John 13:34, 35.

In his first epistle, the apostle continues to accentuate his Lord’s point: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God, for God is love,” 1 John 4:7, 8. Though verse 8 has been tragically mauled by many people who attempt to utilize it to condone anything from sex outside of marriage to homosexual union, in context John explains that it is a selfless love, born from God’s character and expressed through words and conduct that reflects the God who first loved us. If this supposed love practices what God pronounces as evil, it is a perversion of what the apostle and our Lord meant when we are instructed to love one another.

Moreover, Christians are first loved by God Himself. The saints are, “accepted in the Beloved,” Ephesians 1:6. We are beloved, because we have been born again by grace through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, and are accepted by the Father in Him. When the Father sees you or me, He sees the righteousness of His Son, since it is imputed upon everyone who believes the gospel. As John writes so clearly, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another,” 1 John 4:11.God’s demonstrated His love for us by sending Christ to die in our place when we were yet unrepentant sinners, Romans 5:8. True love recognizes love’s source (God Himself) and conforms our love to reflect the One who first loved us in all that we say and do. And for those who have been saved through the One that died for us, we are beloved. Jude uses a normal Christian descriptor when addressing the saints. God loves us because we have been accepted in His Son; so Jude too loves us sight unseen. As we ought to love all of the brethren.

The second portion of the verse declares that Jude, while chosen by the Holy Spirit to be a writer of Scripture, is not an apostle. Neither was Luke, credited of course for the Gospel of Luke and Acts. Neither was Mark, cousin of Barnabas, who wrote the Gospel bearing his name. Potentially, neither was the writer of Hebrews. Though many claim Pauline authorship, I respectfully disagree, and have levelled my argument as to why in my exposition of the epistle.

The apostles were men hand chosen by the Lord, and the initial twelve were named in Matthew 10:2-4. While Judas killed himself after the Lord was sentenced to death, the apostles gathered together to replace Judas, Acts 1:22, 23. Though the lot fell to Matthias, nothing more is said of the man in Scripture, but Christ had actually chosen Saul of Tarsus to replace Judas as the final apostle, Acts 9:15, Galatians 1:1.

What is an apostle, and how may someone become one? Peter stated that one must, “have accompanied us all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John to that day when he was taken up from us, one of these must become a witness with us of His resurrection,” Acts 1:21, 22. Jude, while with the apostles in the room at that time (see Acts 1:14), did not follow the Lord from the first, but was actually antagonistic to Jesus during His earthly ministry, John 7:3-5. While Paul likewise seemed to be disqualified for such a position, Christ had set the former Pharisee aside for the express purpose of apostleship to the Gentiles, revealing Himself to Paul on the Damascene road and vouchsafing the gospel message to him personally. One of Peter’s criteria was that a man was to have been a contemporary of Christ’s and to have traveled with Him prior to His resurrection and ascent to Heaven. 

We can safely say then that the spiritual gift of apostleship ended with John, when he passed away of old age during the close of the first century AD. Anyone else who claims the mantle of apostle since then (and there are many) is a liar, and usurps something that is not theirs to have. Certain fringe sects or cults, such as NAR (New Apostolic Reformation), founded by C. Peter Wagner, claim to have prophets and apostles anew; but this is false, since the office of both was rightly left vacated when the canon of Scripture closed with the book of Revelation. We are expressly cautioned by Paul–a genuine apostle–that prophecy would end when the completed revelation arrived, 1 Corinthians 13:8-10. Even Jude did not take that mantle upon himself, but encouraged his readership to recall the words the apostles spoke to the church. This largely comprises the body of Scripture we refer to as the New Testament, sans Revelation, 1-3 John, and possibly Hebrews, since Jude is believed to have been written circa 70 AD or so. When these final books were written through inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Bible was finished and canon was sealed. The Old and New Testaments were all we needed for all that pertains to life and godliness, for in it God’s divine power through Jesus Christ our Lord is revealed, 2 Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter 1:3.

It is sound counsel. We are to heed the word of God, and not the spurious addendums of men as to what is true and genuine. Rome is a notorious offender here, demanding that readers accept not only the Apocrypha, but their many, many additions to biblical truth that have compiled over the centuries, being supremely guilty of Christ’s warning: “If anyone adds to these things, God will add to him the plagues that are written in this book,” Revelation 22:18, see also Proverbs 30:5, 6. Further examples are legion, and such is the hallmark of a cult. The false teachers want to take Christ’s flock for themselves so they can despoil them; a true teacher should aspire to and endeavor to lead people to Christ. False teachers are a mirror that reflect human ambition and ideology; a biblical teacher should be a window that is transparent enough to let the beholder see through to the Lord, who inspired Scripture and gives the Spirit. Jude wants his fellow saints to practice enough discernment to differentiate between those who follow in the apostle’s path of preaching Christ alone, or those who muddy the waters by twisting Scripture or adding to it, to their eventual doom, 2 Peter 3:16.